Pax, a monument to Aristide Briand, is to the left of the front gate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay. It is by Paul Landowski and was dedicated in 1937. The central relief shows peace sheltering a family; the robed figures represent the nations...

On August 27, 1956, twelve African American young people from Clinton, Tennessee, became the first students to desegregate a public high school in the American South. This was a year before the more famous integration of Little Rock High School in Arkansas. Black...

The RMS Lusitania, a ocean liner of the Cunard Line, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915 and sunk 18 minutes later. 1,198 were killed; there were 761 survivors. Many of the survivors and bodies of the deceased were rescued or recovered by local fishermen from...

Since May 2015, every Monday morning I have been posting a little essay about a peace or social justice monument. For more than a decade, ever since the peaceCENTER was contracted by a national peace & human rights group to develop a workshop exploring strategies for creating memorials about acts of violence and injustice that did not glorify the bloodshed, we have pondered the relationship between the landscape and civic memory.

“I would rather take care of the stomachs of the livingthan the glory of the departed in the form of monuments.”Alfred Nobel

As we showcase these monuments we hope you will join us in this exploration. For now, we’re concentrating on publicly accessible outdoor works. Some are grassroots and homespun; others, more complicated in their funding and execution. They all have a story to tell and we can learn from all of them.

The Canadian Tribute to Human Rights is a monumental sculpture designed by Montreal artist and architect Melvin Charney and unveiled by the fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1990. Standing over thirty feet high and constructed of red granite and concrete, the Monument's red...

In 1964, four businessmen — Joe O. Neuhoff, Julius Schepps, John M. Stemmons, and Peter P. Stewart — wanted the City of Dallas to be known "not only for its worldly aspirations and economic accomplishments, but also for the enduring heart of its citizens." The...

The Ave Quiromantica is a bronze sculpture located on Calle Bolsa, Malaga, Andalusia, Spain. It is half dove and half an open hand, the whole sculpture resting on a marble base. It was based on a sketch done by the poet Rafael Perez Estrada, to whom the monument is...

In 1910 the Nordic Peace Congress in Stockholm decided that a peace monument should be raised on the border between Sweden and Norway to celebrate 100 year of peace between the countries. The building of the peace monument was finished in 1914. The design reflects a...

The Head of the UN Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), Sandra Honoré, unveiled this peace sculpture in the country's capital Port-au-Prince on September 28, 2017. The installation, which will remain at the National Police Academy, is called ‘Ann Chwazi Lapè’ (meaning ‘Let's...

Awakened Mexican-American students were changing the culture at the University of Colorado Boulder campus, as they were nationwide, and the administration didn't like it. In 1973, in apparent retaliation, they cut off the financial aid of the students who had come to...

The stairs of this sculpture are made of black granite. They evoke the image of a war memorial, without specifically referencing life or death. It shows how to get from the word Body to the word Soul by changing one letter at a time to create a new four letter word....

The Monument to World Peace is located near the entrance to the Santos Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro, the site of the 1992 Global Forum, a conference of non-governmental organizations held during the 1992 Earth Summit (formally known as the United Nations...

Could that building's color be enchilada red? San Antonio readers are probably disoriented by this photo. No, this is not the San Antonio Central Library. It is the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, designed by Ricardo Legorreta in 1991, the same year he won...

The President of the Regional Government, Miguel Albuquerque and India’s Ambassador to Portugal, Nandini Singla, dedicated this bust of Mohandas Gandhi in Praça do Povo (People’s Square) on 5 September, 2019. Gandhi passed through Funchal in 1906 as he traveled from...

In 1968, the University of Illinois’ classes of 1918 and 1919 requested Donald J. Molnar, who was a campus landscape architect at the time, to build a memorial commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War I. He envisioned a fountain and a statue in the...

This sculpture, Together for Peace and Justice, by Xavier de Fraissinette, is in the Parc de la Tête-d'Or in Lyon. It was given to the city to commemorate the G7 conference which was held there in June, 1996. The seven figures represent the G7 nations (Canada, France,...

The Sphere was commissioned by the owner of the World Trade Center, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in 1966. Sculptor Fritz Koenig started work in 1967 in his barn in Bavaria, while the WTC was in the planning stages, and finished it four years later in...

Established on January 12, 2017, one of President Obama's last acts as president, Freedom Riders National Monument shares stories of people and places that gained national attention in the fight against the injustices of Jim Crow laws and eventually led to regulations...

The Slave Memorial in Zanzibar, Tanzania, recalls how slaves were once held in underground chambers until sold in the nearby slave market. Swedish sculptor Clara Sönäs produced the work in 1998. The chains are real historical artifacts. The slave trade shifted to East...

Dedicated in November 2017, the Slave Trade Marker, located in a small park where the waters of the Delaware River once flowed, is a cast-iron sign proclaiming in large gold letters the weight of America’s original sin: “Enslaved Africans Once Sold Here.” More than...

The Unsung Founders Memorial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is located in McCorkle Place, one of the University’s quads. The memorial is a black granite tabletop supported by 300 bronze figurines and surrounded by 5 black stone seats. The...

In 2003 Brown University undertook a study of the university’s relationship to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The findings of the three-year study showed that slavery and the slave trade were pervasive throughout Rhode Island; Rhode Island dominated the North...

This sculpture was installed in 2000 in a courtyard at Georgetown University Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. According to the artist, Michael Alfano, ethics means the study of ideal conduct. To that end, the sculpture tries to provide a model for the ideal conduct...

This statue, by Jacques Lipchitz, was commissioned by the City of Philadelphia to fulfill a public art requirement in what is now called Thomas Paine Plaza, in front of the new Municipal Services Building across from City Hall. In 1972 it was in Italy, awaiting...

The Arts of War and The Arts of Peace are bronze statue groups on Lincoln Memorial Circle in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.. Commissioned in 1929 to complement the plaza constructed on the east side of the Lincoln Memorial as part of the Arlington Memorial...

Apotheosis of Democracy is on the United States Capitol House of Representatives portico's east front in Washington, D.C. The pediment's center focal point is the figure of allegorical Peace, which is dressed in armor and is depicted protecting Genius. Leaning against...

Installed on the south side exterior of Philadelphia’s Independence Visitor’s Center in 2003, Alison Sky’s Indelible is a site-specific, narrative work intended to create awareness about American history that has gone undisclosed. The artwork is a stucco relief of a...

In September 2017 the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines unveiled a statue of the late human rights lawyer Jose "Pepe" Diokno, appointed by President Corazon Aquino as the founding chairman of the country's watchdog agency against rights abuses and...

Ten Questions to Ask at a Historic Site

In his book Lies Across America, Professor James Loewen posed these ten questions to ask at a historic site.

1. When did this location become a historic site? (When was the marker or monument put up? Or the house interpreted?) How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person interpreted?

2. Who sponsored it? representing which participant groups’s point of view? What was their position in the social structure when the event occurred? When the site went “up”?

3. What were the sponsor’s motives? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? What were their values?

4. What is the intended audience for the site? What values were they trying to leave for us, today? What does the site ask us to go and do or think about?

5. Did the sponsors have government support? At what level? Who was ruling the government at the time? What ideological arguments were used to get the government acquiescence?

6. Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group told it? Another political party? Race? Sex? Class? Religious group?

7. Are there problematic (insulting, degrading) words or symbols that would not be used today, or by other groups?

8. How is the site used today? Do traditional rituals continue to connect today’s public to it? Or is it ignored? Why?

9. Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What historical sources tell of the event, people, or period commemorated at this site?

10. How does the site fit in with others that treat the same era? Or subject? What other people lived ad events happened then but are not commemorated? Why?

Ready to Kill

by Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems, 1916)

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.I have gone by here before and wondered about it.This is a bronze memorial of a famous generalRiding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard. I put it straight to you,After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,Shaping them on the job of getting all of usSomething to eat and something to wear,When they stack a few silhouettesAgainst the skyHere in the park,And show the real huskies that are doing the work of the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,Then maybe I will stand hereAnd look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air,And riding like hell on horsebackReady to kill anybody that gets in his way,Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.